Hard Work

About a month ago Chris and I spent a Saturday morning in vigorous hard work- raking, tilling, moving, and shoveling dirt. Our backyard has been one of the most neglected parts of the house, falling right behind the front yard. We live in Arizona, it's summer here like 99.99% of the time, and we just moved in. This year. Who really uses their backyard anyway? Unless it's filled with a pool, sprinklers, and a water slide. But then your water bill is over $100 a month. We'd rather not. So we finally decided to try and grow grass in our tiny backyard. That only makes your water bill $80 a month. Anyways, the week before, Chris, my dad, and my dad's friend Mike installed new water sprinklers and helped us clean up the backyard to prepare it for this miraculous green thing we call grass. And I can't thank dad and Mike enough- and the fact that I got to be as far away from the house as possible during this "restoration" process. I would have probably been stressed out, hot, and dirty the whole time. Those three things do not mix well.

Here is our "before" picture of our beautiful yard.

Terribly dull. Sad really. I'm so glad we got adventurous and went to Lowe's. Chris did most of the hard work since he's the man and has muscles. But after a while those muscles started hurting, and that's when I came to the rescue. With my camera.


Look at him go! You can do it Chris! Only 3/4 of the yard to go! I was a great helper. But I did bust out the rake. I got to smooth out the dirt/compost/poo mixture.


One of the things Chris and I have realized about ourselves is that we love houses that back up to a street. The last house we lived in had a street behind our yard, and now this one does too. So many reasons we like it- but this could compete with the #1 reason: "no neighbors looking into your backyard while sunbathing." #2: you can throw dirt, dead grass, and sticks over the fence, and no one will know!! Shhhh!!! It's our secret. But if we do get caught... it was Chris. See? I have proof.


I can't believe I just threw my husband under the bus like that.

We finished off the hard work with the sprinkling of seed, not to be confused with the sprinkling of stardust, but the way this grass grows so fast and green is quite magical. We were tired and hot and sore, but we made the sprinkling festivities quite exciting. Almost magical, like sprinkling stardust.



And now you are begging to see the "after pictures" but I haven't yet journeyed out to the backyard to take a snapshot of the magical grass. But I will. And you will be amazed.